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Verses in Wartime (Part 2: From the Home Front)

By Brian Turner October 24, 2007 7:22 pmOctober 24, 2007 7:22 pm

In my last post, “Verses in Wartime (Part. 1: In-Country),” I shared some of the poems I wrote while deployed to Iraq as an infantry team leader. These were poems written in journals, usually late at night or in the predawn darkness, with a red-lensed flashlight illuminating the page (so as not to wake nearby soldiers racked out after completing our missions).

The poems I’d like to share today were written this month, specifically for this Home Fires installment, and they will surely go through several more drafts before I might consider them for a future collection, or book. I’d like to invite readers of this blog into that process.

When my book, “Here, Bullet,” was published, I told myself I would not write another book about war. I wanted instead to focus on expanding my own possibilities on the page. Then, my old unit returned to Iraq for what turned out to be a 15-month deployment. They sent e-mails detailing some of the situations they faced. Things began switching from the past tense to the present tense. This war felt as if it were surfacing in my everyday life. I was slow to recognize it at first. And at the same time, many of the poems I was writing didn’t seem to connect to my own interior life and the life I’ve been living, here in America.
I realized that the war doesn’t often seem to exist here in America. Or, does it? Maybe it was just that I wasn’t able to recognize it when it surfaces. I have since been writing poems which try to span the oceans with an imaginative bridgework over the horizon — to bring Americans into the dusty streets of Iraq; to bring Iraqis into American cities and into our homes. I’ll admit — it’s definitely a surreal move, one that I’m still working on, and one I invite comments on.

The Cemetery Poem

Michelle finds me long past midnight, shoveling
the grassy turf in our backyard, digging
three feet by six, determined to dig further.
And if she could love me enough
to trust me, to not cover her mouth
in shocked recognition, her hair lit up
in moonlight; if she could simply shovel
into the earth and dig another hole
beside me, straining to bear the weight
each blade lifts in its gunmetal sheen,
then maybe, if she could trust like that
she’d begin to see them — the war dead,
how they stand under lime trees and ash,
here among us, papyrus and stone in their hands.

There will be no dreaming for me.
Not tonight. I dig without stoppingand tell her—We need to help them, if only with a coffin.

Michelle stares out at these blurry figures
in silhouette, the very young and the very old
among them, and with a gentle hand
she stays the shovel I hold, to say —We should invite them into our home.
We should learn their names, their history.
We should know these people
we bury in the earth.

It’s important to have a deep appreciation and understanding of those dying in the war — to stand among civilians caught up in it and the combatants who’ve waged it, to see beyond the numbers and connect with them in a way that pushes beyond journalism and the factual. But the sheer numbers of dead are staggering. Imagine them all lined up outside your own home, waiting to introduce themselves to you. Many might try to suppress this idea (as the “I” character does in this poem by setting out to bury these ghosts as they stand there in the moonlight). If we learn who the dead are and what they were like, if we allow the dead their own unique humanity, we risk the possibility of being overwhelmed by loss. I believe that, as a country which has initiated war, we have no right to do otherwise.

Guarding the Bomber

With his legs gone, bandaged at mid-femur,
he palms the invisible above him like a conductor
in difficult passages of light, fluorescent and streaming,
two gauze-wrapped stumps directing movement
from his shoulders while I wipe salt from his lips
with a wet rag, checking the feeding tube, the I.V.
in his neck, listening to his morphined Arabic
as I imagine him lying there in the debris
and settling dust, his brain snapping back
into momentary consciousness, realizing
that his own feet — still in their sandals —
wait for him across the room, and that his hands —
driven beyond the body — negotiate
black wires and hot wires still, arming
explosives in a 155 mm shell casing,
much of his body unable to sweat, working here
beyond me and my thoughts of his Paradise,
wondering if the virgins will care for him
as I do, changing his bedpan, bathing him
with sponges and reassurances in English —
a language he hates, its vowels
a smooth sheen of oil on steel — no,
he’s far beyond my rifle and desert fatigues,
his ghost limbs dextrous and agile — he’s connecting
the many wires he sees within me, searching
for any flash of brilliance sealed within.

In the Quran, there is one section which discusses how there are a number of angels which must guard the pit of Hell so that those trapped within it cannot escape. What a horrible task something like that might be. As I read the passage, in an odd way it reminded me of when I was in Mosul. An Iraqi man (who had accidentally blown himself up while trying to create a roadside bomb) was placed in a room on the base, with a guard to watch over him (even though his arms and legs had been blown off), while he “recuperated.” I tried to write this poem first from that guard’s point of view, but the poem didn’t work because the medic and the guard had two very different stories to tell.

Many who read this might be offended or disturbed by this line of thinking — caring for those who would kill us — and I fully understand why this may well seem impossible and reprehensible. And I respect that fact. Still, the angels at the edge of the abyss — wouldn’t they want, at some point, to lift those trapped in Hell; to try, if in only the smallest of ways, to offer an alternative to pain and suffering; to try to influence the perceptions of those who would do us harm by showing kindness? If we can never forgive, if we forever guard the pit and lift no one out from the flames, what might that say about us? I’m not saying I’ve been able to do this — the poem is simply considering the idea.

Blood

Here is the whole blood we crave, that bloodstream of war blood, the darkened sidewalks of blood, explosions of roadside blood, shrapnel and bullet-borne blood, scorched asphalt blood, newspaper lifeblood, type O or A or B or AB negative, fire-engine blood, arterial gore blood, mantling blood, Akbar’s spilled blood, Allison’s blood, Abdula’s blood, Sadiq’s blood, Jamal’s blood, Joe’s sunset blood, Ali Baba’s red story of blood, corpuscle by corpuscle turned red as fire, red as copper, red as burning oil, red as history’s burning pages, red as the stammel-dyed civilians lying in the adrenaline streets, their skin turned russet — like the roughened skins of winter apples, wine-colored, vinaceous, lurid, in bloom and draining, the dead and the dying with their gift of blood, a river of blood, an overflowing cup of platelets and rust, an overflowing cup of suffering, an overflowing cup of transfusions, and all of it, every gallon of it, every pint, every spoonful, each precious drop we plunge into any vein that can take it, hypodermic and sweet, that sweet fix needle, our bomb-blast narcotic, this trauma-junkie’s delight.

after Campbell McGrath

In “Blood,” I wanted to meditate on the word “blood,” (I’m sure that part is obvious) but more than that — I wanted to meditate on how I often think about Iraq and Afghanistan and war overall. I remember being glued to television news reports during the opening weeks of the first Persian Gulf War. And there is an aspect of this — something dark and deep within the psyche — which I know I’m not very comfortable with: It’s the curiosity which leads drivers on the freeway to slow down near a car wreck in order to view the aftermath, the gore. It’s a disturbing part of human nature — a curiosity regarding death. As Chris Hedges writes in his book, “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning”: “[W]ar is a drug, one I ingested for many years…The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.”

Because I’m a news junky, I find myself constantly reading news reports and catching media programs on radio and TV. This poem attempts to acknowledge the part of that curiosity that is morbid and destructive, and finds heightened appreciation for life through a tenuous and fragile conduit — the experience of someone else’s loss.

I’d like to ask that people respond to this posting of poetry (if interested in the following idea) by offering up a request for a poem dealing with the Homes Fires theme. I like the idea of being given a challenging “assignment” by someone here in our country, or abroad, and taking up the pen to try to create something lasting and worthy of being read. It would be a collaboration that is definitely unique in my experience. How would you suggest approaching a poem with the intent to study the war that exists among us here in America?

Even more, I’d love to see the poems you write in response to that very same meditation.

Addendum

As Dennis Miller once said while returning to the stage for an encore—this is the caboose’s lament…I thought I should update those of you who might have read my June Home Fire’s entry (“Vegas, Baby”) and wondered what has become of the young woman and the infant boy described in that story.

The young mother tried to go back to living with her own mother, only to find that her own mother (the one with a prison history and more) was doing drugs in the home. (She didn’t tell us this outright, but rather inferred it; I don’t think she wanted to indict her own mother.) So, she decided to check herself in to a six-month-long intensive program to deal with her own substance abuse issues. Her little boy is staying with her throughout the program.

I live in a different city at a distance of an hour away. So, when she is released from the program, Michelle and I have invited her to stay with us until she can get back on her own two feet, get a job, an apartment, and so on. We’re hoping to provide an environment that will help her to make healthier decisions for her and her baby. We’re hoping she’ll take us up on the offer.

As a victim/veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972) I began writing poetry a few years ago as therapy for the awful memories that America’s current needless quagmire in Iraq dredged up in me concerning the previous one over three decades ago in Southeast Asia. I understand and appreciate veterans (of any needless, unforced conflict) who try and put their experiences and interpretations of them into poetry. For my part, I include here a short poem in tribute to other veterans who might have had much to say but found their chances to do so cut short for eternity by an early and needless death. Hence:

“Dead Metaphors”

We serve as a symbol to shield those who screw us
The clueless, crass cretins who crap on our creed
We perform the foul deeds they can only do through us
Then lay ourselves down in the dark while we bleed

Through cheap Sunday slogans they sought to imbue us
With lust for limp legacy laughably lean
Yet the Pyrrhic parade only served to undo us
We die now for duty, not “honor” obscene

We carried out plans that the lunatics drew us
Their oil-spotted, fly paper, domino dream
Then we fought for the leftover bones that they threw us
While carpetbag contractors cleaned up the cream

We did the George Custer scene Rumsfeld gave to us
We took ourselves targets to arrows and bows
While the brass punched their tickets, the Indians slew us
A “strategy” ranking with History’s lows

When veterans balked they contrived to pooh-pooh us
With sneers at our “syndrome” of Vietnam sick
When that didn’t work they set out to voodoo us
With sewer boat slanderers paid to be slick

The wad-shooting gambler comes once more to woo us
His PR team planning precise photo ops
For to sell his used war he’ll have need to construe us
As witless weak wallpaper campaign-ad props

The nuts and the dolts in their suits really blew us
They made our life’s meaning a dead metaphor
Still, no matter how Furies and Fate may pursue us
The Fig Leaf Contingent has been here before

As the years pass in darkness the graveyards accrue us
As early returns on investments gone wrong
So the next time “supporters” of troops ballyhoo us
Remember this warning: our sad silent song

It is so sad. When will we ever learn that war is for greed? I am Leader of a very large Military Families for Peace group since 2003.

A member,Terry Parisi, has tied a ribbon w/ the name of every fallen soldier of this war on a fence at her farm, She is having us over Sun. to help. She said, “It is my passion to continue til this senseless war ends.”
Jane Jensen, Founder/Leader
MilitaryFamilies4Peace.org

Your poetry haunts and affects and brings war home. Many of us try to have the country see the carnage and appreciate the horrors, yet to do so we must immerse ourselves in it. We lament for the loss of cherished life of all people, but to fully experience the subjective joys and pains and developments of our own cherished lives– we block out the macabre, for if we do not,it overshadows everything and taints and distorts our own family joys. When we attempt to balance Richard Engels’ Iraq photos of bodies stacked in a warehouse with fluids running out the doors to the street and your imagery– “like the roughened skins of winter apples” with our own family, professional, recreational, materialistic, and routine life occurences in the US- we start to feel guilt and see our lives as being supported by plunder and our joys become at the expense of the dead. Seeing our own joys as being at the expense of the dead is not a filter we want in our minds.

Your point that war is a drug that feeds us and gives our lives meaning rings true with me, but there are othe aspects of life we have the luxury of focusing on and some of us can compartmentalize all kinds of horrors if we choose to.

And while across the seas
the bombs blast once beautiful bodies
into the dessert sand
As their blood
and the copious tears of those
who watched them die
Still filters,like yesterdays rain
seeping, ever so slowly, into the dry dust.
Those who knew them,
tremble with tears and fear
and ask: Why “them” and not “I”

Here, where music blares, and soon
the snow will fall
Tears have yet to become roaring furious rivers
and flush into the sea
those who for war lust
and arrogntly worship death.

A stiffled sob
A wiped tear
A subdued moan
Seeking to hide the pain
All discretely done
Over there and over here
As the once beutiful bodies
are sent flying into the night air.

We must be patriotic and brave they say
As if life were theirs to take and give
Yet, it is we who have lost a daughter or a son.

And so the fires here at home,
like embers,
continue to burn
Till someone, somewhere, somehow learns
The idiocy and futility of war
That Allah, God, Jehovah and Shango are one.
And life, all life, is sacrosant.
Then, and only then it seems,
Life will be worth living again.
Now,it appears to me,
that only loved ones
and those who know the meaning of love
seem to feel the pain.

Children. I cannot stop thinking of children in a war. I don’t know if I can write a poem, but a story I can tell that has haunted me since 3 years old. A French boy, named Renee, lived in the front house. I found him by climbing up a pipe to his window, and enticed him to climb down and play. We sat in a wooden swing, facing one another, in silence. No, he was silent. I chattered. Then we went to lunch that Mother prepared. Still he was silent. Then his mother came to find him, frantic. They had come from World War 2, France. His dad, American, killed in the war. Dad’s parents brought her and the boy to the US. The boy hadn’t spoken a word, barely ate, since the mom and he had been trapped in their cellar after a bombing raid. Luckily the black bread, and wine she’d made and stored fed them until saved. It was hard for my three year old brain to understand he was in shock, his dad killed, he was almost killed, and what war meant. I kept my own shock to know of his pain, shock because my life was so safe, so loved, both parents available, the first consciousness that life isn’t fair. When the drum starts beating war I fear for the children to this day, Renee’s shocked face appears. Why are humans still choosing this alternative to solve problems?
Thank you for your examining. I admire your questions, you wilingness to think of the “other” as human. I feel hope when I see this.

I am especially grateful for your effort, your engagement, your humanness and your love of language and humanity as a whole. …

Of your three poems shared today, for me the most powerfully moving one, the one that struck with that kind of searing heat that comes of revelation and spoken truth, and burns inside and and leaves that mark that truth and beauty do, was The Cemetery Poem. I’d not change a single word there.

I have known of you, saw you on PBS, but have not read your book–too many books piled up by my bedside waiting to be read. At the moment I’m reading Where War Lives. Do you know it? It packs the same truth of your poems.

I am 65 and a casualty of war, myself, though I have never fought in one, in that Diameter of the Bomb kind of way–my dad left for WWII when I was very small and we were never able to connect when he returned–he, according to my Mom, was a changed person following his service in the South Pacific as a chaplain. He died when I was 14. It has taken me decades to understand and acknowledge the effects that war had on me and consequently on my children and others I love. It is important, what you are doing.

These poems hit me hard in the gut but there is a tenderness that touches my heart. It is important to me to read these poems about witnessing a war that does seem far away but I know it is close to many hearts and there is great suffering. I know poems can tell a story and the story can be told in a multitude of ways…What if the bomber does not hate the reassuring words of the guard? What if to him they are the greatest blessing?

Thank you for these poems.

“If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred. If you want to see the brave, look for those who can forgive.” Bhagavad-Gita

Your poetry is very moving. Anyone who would like to read some “comrade poets” should take a look at the WWI poems of Wilfred Owen and the earlier poems of Seamus Heaney. Some of the poems above remind me especially of Heaney’s “Funeral Rites.”

Even though I have not been in a war I truly can empathise. Your thoughts flow like the “blood” in many of the young people who, as soldiers, face these horrors while on patrols. If more would express themslves as you have done maybe they could better assimilate back into everyday life. Thank you for doing this.

iraq, bosnia, stalingrad, what are these names except tombstones? why not mention the demonic who hunger for these tombstones? why not equate the man whose feet and hands are blown off with the dead in the sea and air, all the animals dying, all the flowers, everything, melting. the poor bloody beings lying on the ground, the gassed, the starved, the variety of them share the same unity: death.

Brian. . . I’ve no topic to suggest for your consideration, at least not yet; just thanks and appreciation for what you have written and are doing which is helping me to share in the unimaginable; the trauma of this war which is the day to day reality for so many. DHH

Thank you, Brian Taylor and Frank Pastizzo, for remarkably haunting and intimate images. Your poems turned my head, and heart, around this morning. They are immediate and timeless. They made me remember myself, years ago, when I still thought in images and emotions. Thank you, thank you, Leigh.

Yes, Brian, this land (our earth with all its human beings) is our land, as Woody Guthrie sang.
Here are some verses about this and the daily news.

In Memory Of Benjamin Linder,,,,,

After awhile with eyes
lifting slowly from the page,
one sees genera and kingdoms,
animal, vegetable, mineral.
Also, I
see the hair on my arm, fur
between kingdoms.
Twilight answers from its back.

I stand up in my room, yes,
to learn more than I know
from the news given away
by unfelt strokes of radar,
to hear
the voice of this
standing with bent head
under the stars.
On my wall the blue-
green cataracted eye, the planet poster,
hangs from its pin.
And so I ask again,
How much land, which land, does a man
need?
Wherever green is worn?
Or blue and white, red,
orange? Yes.
Yes,
when the little O,
this earth, wears the rainbow
raggedly, each man,
woman, child
needs
all.

After awhile with eyes
returning slowly to the page–
yesterday’s, today’s–I say the names: Linder,
Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney, Biko, Corrie,
Ruzicka, the children of Iraq….

Nicely worked ideas. Thank you. I don’t slow down at accidents to see any gore. I slow down to check faces for someone I may know. It would be unforgivable to to miss a friend’s suffering. That’s just sloppy living. Your ability to do a 180 on perspectives is encouraging. If my government says hop to it, then hunkering down may be more responsible. No positives inside such mistrust.
Ideas for your consideration (yours not mine as you are the one with some talent):
Protector vs. protractor,
Does any part of a person kind of glow when they die — a child’s eyes, a man’s jaw shaking, a lady’s face? Can the stories of death you have inside you be much different than those inside a doctor or EMT from all of our hometowns.
Is the intensity of war comparable to any intensity, any adrenalin surge, at home? Not risk, but rather mind-disengaged, physical commitment. Or are both games?
What does it mean when a soldier gets soft in the head or heart? How do you know you can stop it?

Kind Regards,
Chris
What drives people crazy when they return from Iraq? Is it what they did or what they didn’t do?

Thank you, Brian, for these very powerful and painful poems about the experience and reality of war. OI think it is true that it is almost impossible for us at home to understand what you all are going through. As difficult as it is to imagine, I for one feel it is essential to try to grasp what is going on over there and why we must all struggle against it and remember that there are real people with real lives being destroyed. Thanks again for you efforts to bring it back home.

A weekday evening in July:
a stack of air conditioners hum,
each spewing its unique condensate,
dripping down the red bricks and spalling grout
between each floor of our apartment house.

We hear mens voices call out “mom” and “wow”,
as forks and knives clink into sinks.

Eerie rooftop silhouettes fade
with the shortlived twilight.
The creeping nightfall accentuates
the flashing glimmer of dusty Baghdad scenes
coming from a TV in a suddenly darkened room,
where a widow waits on her sagged settee
for sleep to come.

Home from our labors,
the kingdom sups,
then shares the nodding reverie of meat.

First, Don’t ever stop writing. It is rare when it is so obvious that you are doing what the universe meant for you do. You asked for a challenge. What I remember most vividly to this day of my year in Vietnam almost 40 years ago is the fear and the fatigue. They pressed down on me and most everyone I knew every moment of every day. I have always felt that if you hadn’t experienced it, it was probably beyond understanding and if you have experienced it no one need describe it to you. But perhaps you could try to explain what the mixture of fear, fatigue, heat, cold, rain, monotony, a 60 pound ruck, dirt, sweat, smells, stupidity, etc,etc is like.
You said you liked a challenge!

This is such a powerful article. I had to wait until my tears stopped and I was composed to send my comment. My grandson will be deployed for the second time on December 7th and my tears will not stopped until he returns.

Cicero (d.43bc) said “The sinews of war are infinite money.” Shortly after, his head and hands were nailed to the Senate rostrum. Do not think that today the current occupant of the Offal Office in the White House would not condemn the poet of these poems in similar fashion if it meant that his vendetta against a petty and kinky dictator in Iraq would possibly be viewed as a War on Terrorism, a Battle for Freedom, or a Mission Accomplished.

Otherwise, damned great writing with more than just evident talent.

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Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military. The project originated in 2007 with a series of personal accounts from five veterans of the Iraq war on their return to American life. It now includes dispatches from veterans of wars past and present.